L.A.: job export capital; economic idiocy reigned last week in L.A.'s city hall.

LA: Job export capital

ECONOMIC IDIOCY REIGNED LAST WEEK IN L.A.'S CITY HALL

The Los Angeles City Council voted tentatively to increase the business tax on gross receipts by 10 percent. Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores, who voted against the measure, correctly observed the tax hike sends a message that L.A. is "not business-friendly."

The timing of the hike and its message hardly could be worse: Major aerospace contractors here have announced thousands of layoffs and plans to move defense programs, plagued by multi-million-dollar cost overruns, to other communities where expenses can be reduced significantly below here.

Defense contractors literally are fighting for their business lives in a new era of reduced Pentagon spending for arms. Unless program costs are cut, warplane and related contracts are subject to substantial cutbacks, even outright cancellation.

Instead of raising business expense here, L.A. officials should be striving to reduce it in a fight to halt the export of jobs and to encourage the creation of new private industry jobs here. But the economic idiocy that reigns in City Hall prefers to focus on new and higher taxes to help pay for the 1990-91 budget of $3.6 billion, submitted by Mayor Tom Bradley.